Course Contracts
Johnston students can write contracts for most courses that they take (they need the professor's approval for traditional CAS courses). All students (including traditional CAS students) must take Johnston seminars for evaluation and must write a contract. With these contracts they can customize the course to meet their learning and educational needs; it is how the Johnston student takes responsibility and control of their education. The student can contract to do certain requirements outlined in the syllabus while substituting particular requirements in the syllabus with something else. For example, instead of taking quizzes a student could write a short paper or instead of taking a written final a student could take a dialogical final. Students can also increase the number of units the class is for by doing more work or decrease the number of units by doing less work, though either and any of these changes to a class syllabus must be negotiated between the student and the professor.
Whenever a class in contracted, a student must write out a contract, a self-evaluation, and a professor evaluation. A copy of the contract is turned into the Johnston Registar, Theresa Area. Self-Evaluations are to be written at the end of the course and they should explain what the student studied, what they learned and how well they accomplished what they contracted to do. Self-Evaluations are very important so they should be as detailed as possible. Professor evaluations detail how well the professor taught and how useful they were in the learning experience. After the end of a course (and usually within about a semester) the student will receive an evaluation of how well they did in the course. Johnston students receive written evaluations from their professors instead of letter (A-F) or numerical (4.0-0.0) grades. Courses that are not Johnston seminars do not have to be taken for an evaluation and if the student so chooses they may take the course for a letter/numerical grade; but in most instances it is recommended that they are taken for evaluation.
Johnston students are also encouraged, typically as part of finalizing their graduate contract, to teach or co-teach, a course that best exemplifies their accumulated knowledge base. While not a requirement, the communal nature of peer based classroom experiences is often seen as a senior capstone project, with a faculty adviser contributing to the intended syllabus. Previous courses taught by Johnston Students include (but are certainly not limited to!); Books That Make You Want To Write, Feminism in Literature, Media Bias, Woodworking Haphazardly, Survivalism, Ecology and Interactions, Ecofeminism, Industriomasculinity, Nietzsche's Philosophy, and Sustainable Agriculture. In addition to receiving a final written evaluation from the peer-professor pair, students are expected to write Self Evaluations aimed at improving instructor-student understanding of how the course, teacher, and student, met or failed to meet contract expectations.
Read more about this topic: Johnston Center For Integrative Studies
Famous quotes containing the word contracts:
“Bankers, nepotists, contracts and talkies: on four fingers one may count the leeches which have sucked a young and vigorous industry into paresis.”
—Dalton Trumbo (1905–1976)
“If love closes, the self contracts and hardens: the mind having nothing else to occupy its attention and give it that change and renewal it requires, busies itself more and more with self-feeling, which takes on narrow and disgusting forms, like avarice, arrogance and fatuity.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)